5.  The applicants were born in 1945, 1967, 1945, 1953, 1957 and 1959, respectively. Mr Talat Acar lives in İzmir. The other applicants live in Midyat.
6.  At the time of the events the applicants were living in the village of Çalpınar, which is located within the administrative jurisdiction of the town of Midyat, in south-east Turkey.
7.  On 20 April 1992 a number of villagers from Çalpınar village were travelling in two vehicles. Some time after they left their village the vehicles were stopped by a group of village guards[1]. The village guards then opened fire on the villagers and killed six of them, including the first applicant's brother and the sixth applicant's husband, Mr Süleyman Acar[2]. A number of other villagers were injured. Two of the injured persons, including the second applicant's brother and the fifth applicant's husband, Mr Sabri Acar, died the following day in hospital. The third and the fourth applicants were among those injured in the incident. The third applicant, Yusuf Acar, was shot in the leg and his injuries required a month to heal. The fourth applicant, Süleyman Acar, had broken bones and a bullet had split in his body. The doctors did not deem it necessary to remove the bullet pieces as they were not life-threatening.
8.  The same day the Midyat prosecutor visited the area and, with the assistance of a forensic doctor, examined the bodies. It was established that the deceased persons had been shot at close range.
9.  The prosecutor asked the gendarmes who were in the area to collect the spent bullet cases. When the soldiers refused to help him, the prosecutor himself collected and secured a total of sixty-six spent cartridges discharged from the village guards' rifles. The rifles had been given to the village guards by the gendarmerie. As the gendarmes also refused to take the injured persons to the hospital, the prosecutor's clerk had to do it himself.
10.  The prosecutor expressed the opinion that the village guards had set an ambush to kill the villagers.
11.  According to a report prepared by the gendarmerie, however, it had not been the village guards who opened fire on the villagers but a group of PKK[3] members wearing military uniforms.
12.  On 8 July 1992 the Midyat prosecutor filed an indictment with the Midyat Assize Court, charging twenty-seven village guards with multiple offences of homicide and attempted homicide.
13.  For security reasons the trial was moved from the Midyat Assize Court to the Denizli Assize Court, in the west of the country.
14.  Some eight and a half years later the Denizli Assize Court rendered its judgment on 20 November 2000 and acquitted all the defendants.
15.  On 7 February 2002 the Denizli Assize Court's judgment was upheld by the Court of Cassation in respect of seventeen of the twenty-seven village guards but was quashed in respect of the remaining ten.
16.  A retrial began before the Denizli Assize Court, which, on 20 May 2003, found the ten village guards guilty of the murder of the eight villagers as well as the attempted murder of a number of others, including the third and fourth applicants. The village guards were sentenced to life imprisonment. In its judgment the Denizli Assize Court stated the following:
“In view of the autopsy reports, there is no question as to the cause of death of the villagers. Instead, the question to be resolved is whether those who fired on the villagers were the accused village guards.
It is not possible to rely solely on the witness statements as they are contradictory on several points. However the witness statements given during the preliminary investigation seem to be, in general, objective. Relying on these initial statements it is established that the persons who had fired had their faces covered in order not to be recognised.
Furthermore, in the court's opinion, what a military commander should normally do when he is notified of an incident is to go to the scene of the incident as soon as possible. However in the present case, the fact that the non-commissioned officer Ali Kılıç checked all twenty-seven weapons one by one, without taking any action, is incomprehensible. Moreover the court notes that the Midyat Public Prosecutor maintained that the soldiers were not collecting the empty cartridges to help him and that he had to personally collect the empty cartridges which were near the dead bodies. In view of the above, the court concludes that Ali Kılıç, Kazım Demirbaş and Arif Güner were trying to defend the accused who were working with them to fight against terrorism, and therefore it does not find their statements reliable.
Considering the Midyat Public Prosecutor's statements, in which he said that there was a smell of gunpowder, the court comes to the conclusion that the allegation concerning the placing of empty cartridges at the scene of the incident in order to implicate the village guards in the crime is not corroborated in any persuasive manner by eyewitnesses or other evidence.
Moreover, the fact that three of the sixty-six cartridges were not fired from the village guards' weapons cannot be taken as a proof of their innocence. It is possible that one of the village guards had a weapon that had not been seized by the authorities after the incident.
In conclusion, relying on the findings of the ballistic report and the statements of the Midyat Public Prosecutor, who had an impartial position in the present case, the court decides that ten of the accused village guards are responsible for the wounding and killing of the villagers whom they considered to be PKK supporters.”
17.  On 9 December 2004 the Court of Cassation quashed the Denizli Assize Court's judgment in respect of two of the village guards and upheld it in respect of the remaining eight.
18.  Criminal proceedings against the two village guards recommenced before the Denizli Assize Court and are still continuing, according to the information in the case file, as submitted by the parties.